About the Editor

Roberto has over 25 years experience in the IT field, and has spent the last 12 years working in the intersection of open source software and business development. Roberto has taken an active interest in different open source projects and organizations, he has served on advisory boards, and helped large IT vendors, open source vendors and customers to design and deploy their open source strategies. After serving as Senior Director of Business Development at SourceForge for over 4 years, in 2016 he started a new company called Business Follows, whose mission is to is to help developers, companies and organizations to make Open Source development a key part of their business strategies. He is the editor of commercial open source blog.

Unless China or Russia still take a different decision than the EU, I really believe the biggest loser in all of this is the open source movement, which was easily divided by Oracle, which bought out a few people and in most cases benefitted from ideological bias that seemed reversely proportional to some people’s understanding of MySQL’s unique business model.

MySQL is not going to disappear but under Oracle’s control it will not be a competitive force. I doubt that any fork will ever become significant enough. Databases are products that are very much a matter of vendor support: you don’t just buy the product, you buy the vendor.

In that respect and for other reasons, PostgreSQL is not an alternative, is unlikely to be a serious threat to Oracle anytime soon and actually the only real hope for effective competition in the database market is now going to be Microsoft SQL Server, which obviously does have a vendor behind it that commercial customers can rely on.

Like I said, a major defeat for open source. The one person who has most impressed me in this is Richard Stallman because he took a very pragmatic perspective without sacrificing his values. There were some other open souce leaders who gave good input to the European Commission but didn’t speak out in public, at least not in their own name. But most people should really be much more careful about the false friends of open source such as IBM and Oracle.

Some open source activists are much too focused on whatever Microsoft’s CEO might have said years ago but the fact of the matter is that Oracle may now, unless China or Russia still stop them, become the first major IT company to buy an open source product just to get rid of a competitor.

I refrain from making comments here, and I’ll leave this for another post.

Why should PostgreSQL be a threat to Oracle? MySQL has never been a threat to Oracle anyway. 99% of the MySQL users are just looking for a database to store data, they don’t buy support, they don’t need any company in control of the software.

And if they don’t like PostgreSQL, they might take a look at Firebird, CouchDB or another tool. There is so much more out there, MySQL is just one of many.